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that I had done only a small part of what I had intended to write. I still had not gone far enough back. Jim, my narrator—who was a man thirty-three years old—though good, was not able to say all that I wanted him to say. Even when I brought Aunt Margaret, someone twice his age, to help him out, they, both together, could not say it all.
    Before I wrote
Of Love and Dust
—sometime around 1963 or 1964—I wrote a short story titled “Just Like a Tree.” The story was about an old woman who had to move from the South during the civil rights demonstrations. The story was told from multiple points of view—that is, several people telling a single story from different angles. Most of the people were her age, and while they were telling you the reason she had to leave, they were also telling you something about themselves. But they were only touching on their lives; they were not going into any great detail. In the case of Aunt Fe, the protagonist in the story, you only hear snatches of conversation about her life. You know that she must leave the South because they are bombing near her home and she could be killed. But you don’t know her life—where she comes from, her children, her husband— her life, in general, before that particular day.
    Now, I did not know when I wrote the short story “Just Like a Tree” in 1963 or 1964 that four years later I would start out from that idea and write a novel,
The Autobigraphy of Miss Jane Pittman.
As I’ve said before, at this time I still had not published
Catherine
Carmier
; nor did I have any idea that I would write another novel, titled
Of Love and Dust
. But after these two books had been published, as well as the collection of stories
Bloodline,
I realized that I was writing in a definite pattern. One, I was writing about a definite area; and two, I was going farther and farther back into the past. I was trying to go back, back, back into our experiences in this country to find some kind of meaning to our present lives. No, Miss Jane is not the end of my traveling into the past—she is only another step back so that I can see some meaning in the present.
    I knew at least two years before I started writing
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
that eventually I would write it. Maybe I had known it all my life, because it seems that I started writing it many, many years before, when I used to sit on the porch or the steps and write letters for the old people. But it took me at least two years after I first conceived the idea to start working on the book. I held back as long as I could because I knew I did not know enough. I had an idea of what I wanted to say—I wanted to continue from “Just Like a Tree”—where a group of people tell the life story of a single woman. But this woman in “Just Like a Tree” would live to be 100 years old—110, to be exact—with her life extending over the last half of the nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth. But did I know enough to try such a project? The narrative technique would be easy—I had done it already in “Just Like a Tree”—but what in the world would these people talk about that could possibly fill five hundred pages?
    After the
Bloodline
stories, I realized that in order to tell what I wanted to say about the people and the place, I had to go much farther back in time.
Catherine Carmier, Of Love and Dust,
and the
Bloodline
stories were easy writing, and I was writing about things that could have happened in the South during my lifetime, but I wanted to go farther back now, to a time before I, my parents, even my grandparents were born.
    In the fall of 1967, I visited Alvin Aubert, a friend at Southern University in Baton Rouge. We sat in the living room while his wife prepared dinner in the kitchen. I said to him, “Al, what were those old people talking about when they visited my aunt and when they talked all day on the porch around the fireplace and at night? I can remember that they